With the ever-increasing use of mobile communication devices such as cellular telephones and smart phones, users of such devices are becoming ‘wired-in’ for communications almost twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week and fifty-two weeks a year. The advantage of the mobile stations and the communications networks that provide various voice call, messaging and data services to users of such devices is that they can deliver communications anywhere any time that a device is on and has access to a network. As a consequence, a user may receive a call or an incoming message at any time of day or night, whether convenient or not.
A mobile station has the capability to generate an audible alert, referred to as a ringtone or call sound, whenever it receives a call or message. Many such devices offer the user various options or selections with regard to the ringtones, for example, different tones for calls as opposed to one or more types of messages. Some devices generate different ringtones based on caller identification information, such as whether or not the caller is a party on a contact list stored in the mobile station. The user may also be able to select a no-ringtone setting, for some or all types of incoming communications. The mobile station may also offer a range of volume settings from an OFF (no audible sound—similar to a no-ringtone setting) to some maximum available volume setting. However, once set to a particular tone and level, the mobile station will generate the corresponding tone (e.g. signifying an incoming voice call or new message directed to the station) at the set volume, for as long as the user leaves the device settings in place. The ringtone to use for a particular type of incoming communication and the volume will change only when the user changes the relevant setting(s). As a result, the mobile station will ring, potentially with a loud disturbing volume, at times when it may not be convenient to the user but the user has not changed the necessary setting(s).
For example, a loud ring due to a call or incoming message may ruin the user's good sleep. A customer service representative might call the user at 5:30 AM PST, because it was 8:30 AM EST at the representative's location. Sometimes, calls to the wrong number might come in at 2:00 AM, and force the user awake just to find out somebody dialed the wrong number. Many mobile stations offer different ringtones and settings for voice calls and voice mail messages. If the user turns off the voice call ringtone, the user may still hear a tone if the caller decides to leave a voice message, unless the user also has turned off the voice message tone function.
There have been proposals to block or divert incoming telephone calls based on time of day and/or day of the week. For example, a business having offices in different time zones might instruct the phone network to route incoming calls to an east coast office while open but divert calls to a west coast office after the east coast office closes at the end of each business day. Individual subscribers might configure the call forwarding on their home telephone line or cell phone to forward all calls to voice mail at certain times, e.g. during the hours they intend to sleep. These approaches have relied on complex systems in or connected to the telephone network to accept timing instructions from the user and to route the calls based on time. Also, in the mobile station context, a voice mail message might still generate an alert at the mobile station during call forwarding to voice mail.
Also, banks as well as mobile service providers and other businesses are using mobile messaging services like the short messaging service SMS to send various notification messages to their customers. A bank might send a SMS alert about an auto transfer from the user's account at 5:00 AM PST, which is 8:00 AM EST for the bank system based say in New York. There have been proposals to adjust the message delivery time for the time zone of the intended mobile recipient. However, these solutions have been developed for network elements or for the automated equipment that generate the messages, and are not directly controlled by the user and may not be implemented by all enterprises that want to send messages to a particular user. For example, a user's mobile service provider may have a time adjustment solution in place, but her bank may not. In which case, the bank's messages may still come in late at night such that the ringtone wakes the user.
The user may find the late night calls and messages, and the attendant ringtone alerts, very disturbing. However, the user may not want to turn her cell phone off or change the ringtone settings at night. If turned off, the mobile station would not record data regarding incoming calls and messages, which is often useful information. Also, the user may forget to turn the mobile station back on or change the settings back each morning. Turning the mobile station off or changing the settings every night is tedious for the user to do consistently on a long-term regular basis.